Postpaid plans (the traditional ones which have contracts) usually give discounted or free phone upgrades while prepaid does not, so they can bring the price down.
If a you manually copy text then that's a "gesture". Sites are able to add malicious code when you copy text and this won't change as far as I know. In terms of security, it's horrible but not new.
It's not a huge battery drain when I use it at all. Google already has a history of where you go so I don't even know why they would need more battery for it.
I saw a few of livestream scams happen real-time so let me explain what I saw. I didn't see it on YouTube but I saw it on Twitch a few times and I never saw anyone mention it before.
Short answer is it's an evolution of the Elon Musk Twitter scams where people are told to send crypto (Usually bitcoin) to an address to double it. The main difference than the traditional scams is with livestream you have an audience - the chat.
Tens of thousands of viewbots to bring the counter on the livestream high and then the chat is flooded with chat messages but fake accounts that I can see how people could think they were real. Things trying to convince you that it is safe, that it worked, and even talking with each other asking how easy it is.
It doesn't matter if the account is banned after 20 minutes or more, it's already done the damage.
First time I saw this was about ~6 months ago. It was a fake account with a similar name for a Dota streamer. They had fake footage of the game and I was pretty shocked. It had something like 10,000 viewers and after reporting the channel it was still up for a while.
Other times I've seen it with Elon Musk with footage of the Tesla plant talking to a reporter about crypto. I can see how the voices can be fakes as well and how much potential it can have when combined with the chat. These were up for less time.
If anyone has the issue with Windows and it taking forever try uninstalling, wiping all your user data in AppData and then reinstalling. Worked for me at least after being extremely frustrated. I think they are converting the windows version to the same platform.
Not saying it doesn't frustrate me with other things. I haven't used the Mac client in a while but I remember it being really good though
If I had to guess why you had issues, the app probably had certificate pinning. Apple makes it pretty easy to pin domains, but it's also not too difficult to circumvent it.
It's a bit skewed since it's a default system installed app and people generally aren't going to rate it unless they are unhappy but hopefully it doesn't blow over. I agree that there are a lot of people who are unhappy (including myself).